Here are five frequently asked questions that every PM needs to read:

Let’s face it- 24 hours in a day seems limiting. After all, you have deadlines, coworkers to manage, and a looming project. How do the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with all their responsibilities, have enough time to accomplish their goals?  One common characteristic of very successful people is excellent time management skills. By not learning or employing time management techniques, you are not working efficiently as possible.

We will go over five time management tips that will hopefully save you time, money and increase your efficiency. They say it takes three weeks of repetition to make an action a habit-what are you waiting for!? Start practicing the time management skills shown below.

#1) Track your daily activity

Principle Three: Prioritize

You’d be surprised at how much time you, and your development team, are wasting by not assigning priority and severity to every task.  Issues come in, bugs are discovered, and new application features are conceived of every day. Every item won’t be crucial to fulfilling your business goal, but your team has no way of concretely which tasks are most important to the company unless someone in management tells them.  Priority tells your team how important it is that they resolve this issue immediately.  Assigning priority and enforcing it, whenever any task or issue is assigned, will make your team work more efficiently.  

Setting priority is akin to designating a time slot for every task that you assign a team member during the day.  Urgent issues and tasks are certain to be tackled first thing in the morning, with low priority items waiting until later on when all others have been completed. With a clear idea of which tasks, issues or tests are most important, your team members can easily plan their days to make the best use of their time.  Think about your own work habits.  Without prioritizing, it’s easy to get caught up in busy work, fielding every new issue that comes in.  But just because an issue was the last one to cross your desk doesn’t make it the most important. Now think about how you structure your own to-do list? If you think that something is critical, but potentially time consuming,are you more or less likely to put it first on your list? However, if you KNOW that this thing is of highest importance to your boss, does it move up on your to-do list?

The following 5 principles lay out the steps you should be following, to make sure that your projects are completed on time, and on budget, successfully.

1) Communicate

 40% of project managers cited poor communication as the leading cause if IT project failures. If everyone involved in your IT project doesn’t know what they’re working on, when it’s due, how to get itdone and who the audience is, how can you possibly expect your project to succeed? All of the other principles that come later on rely on your communication, expectations, goals, resources, deadlines, priorities, reports and budgets all need to be available to your team so that they can do their jobs properly. Yes, communicating all of these things can sometimes be difficult, particularly if it’s a short project with a tight deadline, or half of your team is located overseas. It doesn’t matter. With all of the technology readily available to us today, there is NO excuse for lack of communication. Tools like web-conferencing actually make it possible for your developer in Hyderabad to share his screen with you in New York, to demonstrate how exactly to recreate major bug in your application.